Care for seniors and the sick during the holidays. "The situation is difficult on many levels."

For years, doctors have been conducting outreach activities presenting the problem of seniors in hospital wards in December. It happens that they are not picked up for the holidays by their families, and sometimes it is even noticed that the family prefers the senior to stay in the hospital rather than go home. The situation is multidimensional.

Cases of extreme irresponsibility and situations resulting from powerlessness

According to doctors affiliated with the Regional Medical Council in Szczecin, the problem exists and should be discussed, but the thesis that we are dealing with a mass phenomenon cannot be accepted. Caring for a senior citizen is a difficult matter and requires knowledge and commitment from the family. However, it cannot be that the doyen of the family is left in the hospital when it turns out that caring for him at home is impossible.

- In extreme cases, I have encountered situations where we suspected that the patient had not been given medication for some time, only to feel worse just before Christmas. This is an irresponsible and extremely dangerous situation. It also happens that caregivers simply lie about a senior citizen's condition in order to admit him to the ward. However, it should be emphasized that these situations are a minority, and we note that responsible families outnumber those who do not take care of their parents or grandparents," says Aleksander Matysiak, secretary of the Regional Medical Council in Szczecin.

However, there is more traffic at hospital emergency rooms before the holidays.

- This is due to this intensification before the holidays, but also to the fact that orthopedic injuries are more common, Matysiak says.

"The system needs to work more efficiently."

According to the president of the Regional Medical Council in Szczecin, senior citizen policy and the system of gerontological care in Poland needs to be more precise and open to the real needs of families. According to experts, the formulations regarding the care of seniors and "dropping" them off at hospitals arouse great public outrage, but very often they are simply an act of desperation on the part of the family, rather than a situation resulting from laziness and ignorance, for example.

- I am not excusing such situations, but the system needs to work more efficiently on this subject. After all, it comes to a situation where a senior citizen has to be provided with a stay in a social care home and the waiting time for a place goes beyond human comprehension many times over.... - says Michal Bulsa, president of the Regional Medical Council in Szczecin.

- The same is true for elderly caregivers, who are also entitled to time off for the holidays. So the family is left with the dependent senior for several, sometimes several days. These are very difficult situations and should not be considered only in terms of social angst," says Michal Bulsa.

For several years, the Warsaw District Medical Chamber has been running a widely publicized campaign called "Shared Holidays," in which it argued that a discussion should be undertaken about the care and loneliness of seniors during the holidays.

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